Why were people so skinny in the 70s and 80s

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coachella girls look fat to me.

Eating disorders have destroyed the heathy perspective

BS. Look at the trio behind the girls in red/black. A lot of women look like that. They are fat. Compare them to the average young woman in the 70s/80s. They look nothing alike. Even the slimmer girls in front are bigger than they used to be. How did "eating disorders" change that? Unless you think everyone looked really unhealthy decades ago. Eating disorders aren't playing tricks on our eyes, the women are bigger than they used to be decades ago. It's only the why that's up for debate. But part of it is people are eating a lot of unhealthy food in massive portions too frequently and not getting enough exercise, among other explanations.

No. It’s not fat. You are the disordered one in your perception.

Those women look way healthier than at Woodstock and are skinny.

you don't even know what the word skinny means or looks like.

Okay eating disorder poster, ... I'M the one that does not know what skinny mean.. it's not YOU. It could not be YOU. NEVER.

That is exactly the definition of eating disorder, looking at skinny and thinking fat.

So if someone doesn't agree with you they have an eating disorder? And NO you don't know what skinny means. It means skin and bones. You can see no bones on those girls. You need glasses.

^ just because someone isn't skinny it doesn't make them fat. I never said they were fat, there is a spectrum from skinny to fat all the way to obese. Skinny is actually a negative connotation, by calling those girls "skinny" you aren't complimenting them. It implies malnourished and isn't a good thing. Which you would understand if you actually knew what "skinny" meant.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coachella girls look fat to me.

Eating disorders have destroyed the heathy perspective

BS. Look at the trio behind the girls in red/black. A lot of women look like that. They are fat. Compare them to the average young woman in the 70s/80s. They look nothing alike. Even the slimmer girls in front are bigger than they used to be. How did "eating disorders" change that? Unless you think everyone looked really unhealthy decades ago. Eating disorders aren't playing tricks on our eyes, the women are bigger than they used to be decades ago. It's only the why that's up for debate. But part of it is people are eating a lot of unhealthy food in massive portions too frequently and not getting enough exercise, among other explanations.

No. It’s not fat. You are the disordered one in your perception.

Those women look way healthier than at Woodstock and are skinny.

you don't even know what the word skinny means or looks like.

Okay eating disorder poster, ... I'M the one that does not know what skinny mean.. it's not YOU. It could not be YOU. NEVER.

That is exactly the definition of eating disorder, looking at skinny and thinking fat.

So if someone doesn't agree with you they have an eating disorder? And NO you don't know what skinny means. It means skin and bones. You can see no bones on those girls. You need glasses.

No if you look at skinny people and say fat, you are disordered.

You mean heroine chic, no I'm talking skinny. Girl you need a therapist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coachella girls look fat to me.

Eating disorders have destroyed the heathy perspective

BS. Look at the trio behind the girls in red/black. A lot of women look like that. They are fat. Compare them to the average young woman in the 70s/80s. They look nothing alike. Even the slimmer girls in front are bigger than they used to be. How did "eating disorders" change that? Unless you think everyone looked really unhealthy decades ago. Eating disorders aren't playing tricks on our eyes, the women are bigger than they used to be decades ago. It's only the why that's up for debate. But part of it is people are eating a lot of unhealthy food in massive portions too frequently and not getting enough exercise, among other explanations.

No. It’s not fat. You are the disordered one in your perception.

Those women look way healthier than at Woodstock and are skinny.

you don't even know what the word skinny means or looks like.

Okay eating disorder poster, ... I'M the one that does not know what skinny mean.. it's not YOU. It could not be YOU. NEVER.

That is exactly the definition of eating disorder, looking at skinny and thinking fat.

So if someone doesn't agree with you they have an eating disorder? And NO you don't know what skinny means. It means skin and bones. You can see no bones on those girls. You need glasses.

No if you look at skinny people and say fat, you are disordered.

You mean heroine chic, no I'm talking skinny. Girl you need a therapist.

You're an absolute idiot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm old enough to remember, I was a 70s kid and 80s teenager. The 1970s were the era of rampant inflation -- way worse than right now -- so families had less money to spend and there was less food in the fridge. There were also fewer brands to buy. My mother used to chop up carrot sticks and celery and put them in a bowl of cold water n the fridge. I would use tongs to pull some out as a snack on a plate with cheese and peanut butter after school. My mother also made fresh bread almost every day, and we had a backyard garden with blueberries, snap peas, and other goodies. Kid's PE class at school was intense. I remember sprinting in every class, doing a ton of pushups and situps. My mom weighed her food on a tiny scale and never ate a serving larger than so many milligrams.

Aerobics came along in the 1980s (Jane Fonda) as well as Jazzercise. These were huge crazes. So fitness became a big thing as food choices bloomed.

Yep. In the 70s-80s women especially were much more deliberate about maintaining their weight. It was important to them. Now being fat is normalized and ok and the majority of people are, so why not you? People have stopped caring. It’s easier to get doordash, work from home, never move, and live in elastic waist pants

[Anonymous]

Both my parents smoked in the 80s. My dad had a RX for speed (for weight control). My parents did all kinds of diets - grapefruits, scarsdale, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of ideas out there but we actually don’t really know.

“ A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/

This. It could be the rise of obesogens - things like BPA and phthalates that are pervasive in the environment and in our bodies. You can thank the chemical lobby and money in politics for not protecting us from these poisons. U.S. women's breast milk contains more chemicals compared to European mothers. In Europe chemicals have to be proven safe instead of proven harmful like here. Some of these chemicals may cause epigenetic changes in metabolism across generations.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-forever-chemicals-breast-milk-us-study

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine/toxic-breast-milk.html

When European scientists first saw the test results of American women, they thought there must be a mistake. Our levels were 10 to 100 times higher than those of women in Europe and Japan.

This

People are missing this. I’ve read several articles that underline that the way we eat really hasn’t changed much since about the 1980s— and yet people are still bigger.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is what gets me thinking - to what extent is BMI at all a valid way of evaluating things?

It's just kind of mindblowing. So if the healthy BMI is between 18.5-25, then a 5'4 woman should weigh anything from just under 110 to just over 140. At 118-120, I'm at the lower end of normal, but I don't think of myself as thin at all. I'm athletic and maybe even bulky to some. In the 70s and 80s, I'd probably be considered thick, having a good sized booty for a white woman. It seemed like normal/thin for a young woman at that time would be a BMI under 20. Now, by BMI I am absolutely "skinny" in comparison, at the 15th or so percentile. It's mindblowing that the average woman of my height weighs 50 lbs more than me. The AVERAGE! Which means, by standard deviation, there could very well be more people who weigh 100 lbs more than me than those who weigh less than me. That is absolutely nuts and should not be normalized. Normalize health, not disordered eating, in either direction.

BMI is such a terrible measure the military doesn’t really use it because most men can’t go through basic training, gain all that muscle and still have a healthy BMI.

Most people don't have the activity level of someone in boot camp. BMI is one indicator, if you are outside of healthy range, it's an indication that more analysis is needed. Do you have an extremely small or large frame? Are you extremely muscular? Are other health indicators in a healthy range? Just one measurement but an easy one.

The vast majority of women are not capable of having enough muscle mass to through them into an unhealthy BMI while having a low body fat. If you are a women, not an elite athlete or body builder, and have a BMI over the healthy range, you are overweight.

I disagree. You take any girl that is 5'9" above they have the body mass and muscles to make BMI very unreliable. There is actually a lawsuit against the military the lays out the science, because BMI isn't used for men but is was being used against women. The women won.

You don't understand the science.

I was in the military. They don’t use BMI, what are even talking about. If you are overweight, they measure various parts of your body and plug those into an equation to get a sense on your body fat.

[Anonymous]

As for the language fights…I think “skinny” means something different today than it did in the 1980s/1990s. Growing up, “skinny” meant “very thin,” perhaps painfully so.

I’m an elder millennial who is smaller then the average American woman. I would never consider myself thin or skinny— I grew up with Kate Moss and the heroine chic look. But I’ve seen so many people with my general body type called “skinny” in the past 5 years. It’s neither a good thing or a bad thing but “back in my day,” I never ever would’ve been considered skinny!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of ideas out there but we actually don’t really know.

“ A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/

This. It could be the rise of obesogens - things like BPA and phthalates that are pervasive in the environment and in our bodies. You can thank the chemical lobby and money in politics for not protecting us from these poisons. U.S. women's breast milk contains more chemicals compared to European mothers. In Europe chemicals have to be proven safe instead of proven harmful like here. Some of these chemicals may cause epigenetic changes in metabolism across generations.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-forever-chemicals-breast-milk-us-study

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine/toxic-breast-milk.html

When European scientists first saw the test results of American women, they thought there must be a mistake. Our levels were 10 to 100 times higher than those of women in Europe and Japan.

This

People are missing this. I’ve read several articles that underline that the way we eat really hasn’t changed much since about the 1980s— and yet people are still bigger.

It has changed drastically, I can’t believe you can even claim it hasn’t. Do you see what people eat and the portions? Have you seen what schools feed kids, now TWICE per day? As if giving them crap food at lunch wasn’t enough, let’s do breakfast now too. And people do not move. People have everything delivered, including groceries, takeout, and anything they could ever want. They work from home and when not “working” are staring at their computer or phone in their free time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it’s related to the microbiome. For some reason, something in our air, water, or food has shifted the mix of bugs in our guts. No sure exactly how, but I think this is driving the obesity epidemic.

Portion sizes also got much, much larger.

This was an interesting theory about a decade ago but it hasn’t really gone anywhere. Seems like it was just the portions and snacks all along.

What are you talking about? The harm to the microbiome is widely discussed as a theory. You are wildly out of touch.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of ideas out there but we actually don’t really know.

“ A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/

This. It could be the rise of obesogens - things like BPA and phthalates that are pervasive in the environment and in our bodies. You can thank the chemical lobby and money in politics for not protecting us from these poisons. U.S. women's breast milk contains more chemicals compared to European mothers. In Europe chemicals have to be proven safe instead of proven harmful like here. Some of these chemicals may cause epigenetic changes in metabolism across generations.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/13/pfas-forever-chemicals-breast-milk-us-study

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine/toxic-breast-milk.html

When European scientists first saw the test results of American women, they thought there must be a mistake. Our levels were 10 to 100 times higher than those of women in Europe and Japan.

This

People are missing this. I’ve read several articles that underline that the way we eat really hasn’t changed much since about the 1980s— and yet people are still bigger.

It has changed drastically, I can’t believe you can even claim it hasn’t. Do you see what people eat and the portions? Have you seen what schools feed kids, now TWICE per day? As if giving them crap food at lunch wasn’t enough, let’s do breakfast now too. And people do not move. People have everything delivered, including groceries, takeout, and anything they could ever want. They work from home and when not “working” are staring at their computer or phone in their free time.

Why don’t you try reading the article first instead of flipping out?


https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Both my parents smoked in the 80s. My dad had a RX for speed (for weight control). My parents did all kinds of diets - grapefruits, scarsdale, etc.

Omg, I remember the Scarsdale diet. It gave me an eating disorder as a teen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As for the language fights…I think “skinny” means something different today than it did in the 1980s/1990s. Growing up, “skinny” meant “very thin,” perhaps painfully so.

I’m an elder millennial who is smaller then the average American woman. I would never consider myself thin or skinny— I grew up with Kate Moss and the heroine chic look. But I’ve seen so many people with my general body type called “skinny” in the past 5 years. It’s neither a good thing or a bad thing but “back in my day,” I never ever would’ve been considered skinny!

I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who uses "skinny" to mean healthy and/or thin. It's usually said about an underweight child. I never hear of adults called skinny. But one here there seems to be someone obsessed with the idea of "skinny" women and starts posts like "Skinny moms what do you eat in a day" or "skinny moms are you jealous of other skinny moms?". Very weird. Probably the same person accusing everyone else of having an eating disorder. Or maybe English is not their first language. When people want to get in shape its to look toned and athletic not to be skinny.

[Anonymous]

At least people are kinder now. In the early 2000s, cruelty about weight was horrific. There’s never any need for that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As for the language fights…I think “skinny” means something different today than it did in the 1980s/1990s. Growing up, “skinny” meant “very thin,” perhaps painfully so.

I’m an elder millennial who is smaller then the average American woman. I would never consider myself thin or skinny— I grew up with Kate Moss and the heroine chic look. But I’ve seen so many people with my general body type called “skinny” in the past 5 years. It’s neither a good thing or a bad thing but “back in my day,” I never ever would’ve been considered skinny!

I don't know anyone under the age of 50 who uses "skinny" to mean healthy and/or thin. It's usually said about an underweight child. I never hear of adults called skinny. But one here there seems to be someone obsessed with the idea of "skinny" women and starts posts like "Skinny moms what do you eat in a day" or "skinny moms are you jealous of other skinny moms?". Very weird. Probably the same person accusing everyone else of having an eating disorder. Or maybe English is not their first language. When people want to get in shape its to look toned and athletic not to be skinny.

Oh I see it all the time— sometimes it’s slightly derogatory, to complain about all attention/jobs/etc being given to “skinny women.” (Who are indeed small but not “skinny” at least to me).

I’ve also seen it in the health and diet context— how to stay skinny, etc. There’s a whole popular book series on how to become (and stay) a “skinny b” by eating vegan.